Moth, Meet Flame

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My impression is that Bowe Bergdahl didn’t fit into miilitary life and was unpopular with the other guys in his unit, although that could be wrong. He had been home-schooled and was possibly unskilled at fitting into a group. His Wikipedia profile, which seems unbiased, is of someone who just plain didn’t know how to “play along.”

That said, the viciousness of the Right’s attack on Bergdahl and his family, especially his father, does remind one of a school of hungry piranha. Typical behavior for them, though. And it seems the announcement of Bergdahl’s release was barely out of anyone’s lips before congressional Republicans were screaming for investigations and hearings.

Next week, there will be a news story about President Obama eating a tuna fish sandwich, and congressional Republicans will call for an investigation of the tuna industry and its possible connections to the Administration.

There’s a lot that we don’t know about this case, but there’s nothing about it I’ve heard so far that breaks with long-established precedent involving presidents and prisoner exchanges. And we all know that if a Republican president had done exactly the same thing, the Right would be ready to carve his head next to George Washington’s on Mount Rushmore.

Fox News is running a story that the intelligence community investigated Bergdahl’s conduct. The article quotes an unnamed “counterterrorism official” hinting that Bergdahl possibly corroborated with the enemy. The right-wing side of the Web is linking to this article as proof that Bergdahl is a traitor, even through all that presumed investigation hasn’t led to anyone actually charging him with anything. That could still happen, of course. But even if he is never charged or even is exonerated, don’t expect anyone on the Right to change his or her mind. Anyone named Bergdahl living in a red state might want to change his name, or move.

We’re going to be hearing about Bergdahl from now until the 2016 elections. Whether this story will have any impact on people who don’t already have Obama Derangement Syndrome remains to be seen. It might actually make the majority of Americans more exhausted with wingnuts than they already are.

See also:

Wingnuts’ war on the troops: The ugly lesson of Bowe Bergdahl and Sarah Palin

Bowe Bergdahl Is the Right’s New Benghazi

GOP Strategists Arranged Interviews With Angry Members Of Bergdahl’s Platoon

Pathologies, Individual and Collective I

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Nicholas Kristof is visitng the Rohingya Muslims of Burma (Myanmar). This is a situation I’ve been following fairly closely in my capacity as a chronicler of Buddhism for the other website. There’s is no question the predominantly Buddhist majority of Burma is committing a crime against humanity in regard to the Rohingya. I wrote an article with background about Buddhist violence against Rohingya awhile back.

I’ve learned more since, which I included in My Book, Rethinking Religion. Violence connected to religion has been increasing around the world, and to analyze why that is so I used Burma as one of my examples. Another example is Sri Lanka, which has been just as bad and has the potential of being just as bad again, if not worse.

When we hear about violence associated with religion, we tend to think that religion caused someone to be violent. But it isn’t that simple. Most of the time, when you look closely at “religious” violence, there are all kinds of historical, cultural and political factors mixed in as well. This is true even of episodes like the Spanish Inquisition that appeared to be about doctrinal purity; much else lurked beneath the surface. Indeed, most of the time the historical, cultural and political factors are the real drivers of the violence, and religion is called in mostly to act as a moral cover or justification. Motivations that are packaged to be “religious” often are anything but when you look at them closely, and that’s very much true of both Burma and Sri Lanka right now.

A lot of this has to do with our old friend, the existential threat. In both Burma and Sri Lanka, the religious-ethnic majority has become obsessed with the belief that one or more minority groups are about to wipe them out. And in both Burma and Sri Lanka, this is nonsensical. Burma is about 90 percent Buddhist and 4 to 8 percent Muslim. Sri Lanka is 70 percent Buddhist, 10 percent Muslim, 5 or 6 percent Christian (mostly Catholic) and the remainder are mostly Hindu. Buddhism has been established in both countries for many, many centuries and is an inextricable part of culture there. Buddhism also dominates both nations’ politics not unlike the way Christianity dominates politics here. Which is part of the problem.

In Burma, for example, hard-liners in the government are fanning the flames in an effort to prevent reform. There is at least tacit coordination in rhetoric and effort between the political hard-liners and a faction of reactionary monks supporting the oppression of the Rohingya. Both groups are trying to hurt Aung San Suu Kyi by trying to force her to takes sides, either with the Muslims (which would kill her political career) or with the Buddhists (which would kill her reputation with the rest of the world). She has been desperately clinging to a fence and pissing off everybody.

So, it’s complicated. One part that isn’t complicated is Buddhism itself. There is absolutely no justification for violence against the Rohingya in Buddhist scripture or doctrine. This is true in spite of the claims of some western academics who say otherwise, based on gross misreadings of scriptures. I’ve some to think that those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; and those who are completely and utterly inept get Ph.D.s in religious studies specializing in Buddhism. That may be the topic of my next book.

Those justifying the violence by declaring they are “defending Buddhism” are, in effect, destroying a village to save it. And in this case the village didn’t need to be saved. It’s mass insanity. And there are a lot of historical, social-cultural, and political factors behind the insanity.

I have more to say, but I think I wil save it for the next post.

Upton Sinclair Was Right

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There’s a famous quote by Upton Sinclair, It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. I’m adding corollaries: It’s difficult to get someone to perceive bigotry when his own bigotry depends on not perceiving it. And, it’s difficult to get someone to perceive reality when his ideologies depend on reality not being real.

Along those lines, wingnuts for the past few years have been babbling about the great things Chris Christie has done for New Jersey and Scott Walker has done for Wisconsin. But it’s all air. Elias Isquith:

In part because the New Jersey economy has performed so poorly during Christie’s tenure (it’s ranked 48th in the country in private-sector job creation, tied with the economic powerhouse known as Mississippi), the state’s finances, which Christie used to brag about fixing, are in utter disarray. Its debt, for example, has been downgraded by Wall Street rating agencies six times under his leadership — three times in 2014 alone. Christie now faces a budget gap for this and the coming fiscal year that is nearly $3 billion; and because the state constitution mandates that the government balance the budget by June 30, Christie has now been forced to find the money by reneging on a key part of his landmark pension reform agreement, taking funds that were supposed to go toward public workers’ pensions and using them to fill the budget gaps instead.

Remember, he began his tenure by halting a tunnel project that had already begun and for which the state had received millions of federal dollars the feds then wanted back. He’s been killing one job after another and screwing state finances since he took office.

Trying to tie down factual job growth data appears to be like trying to catch lightning in a bottle, particularly since so many media outlets reporting it clearly are spinning for somebody, and looking at raw numbers from any one particular month can be deceptive. Still, if a politican (say, a governor) gets elected by claiming that he would bring 250,000 jobs to his state (say, Wisconsin), and as his first term draws to an end it appears fewer than half of those jobs actually materialized, and the governor (say, Scott Walker) tries to fudge by claiming that 17,000 new businesses that are hiring people were begun during his tenure, and it turns out he’s getting the 17,000 number by counting Scout Troops and condo associations, then I’d say he failed. One could argue that governors really can’t do much to create jobs, but then all that nonsense about busting public employee unions and laying off teachers was justified by promises that, somehow, this would grow jobs. Eventually. Magically. Maybe it would at least appease the Fiscal Austerity Fairy.

Elsewhere, the meme has thoroughly taken hold in Wingnut World that the Isla Vista shootings can’t be blamed on misogyny because the shooter was mentally ill. I’ve already explained why this is a bogus argument, but it’s an argument fervently embraced largely by men who appear to share some of Rodger’s social pathologies. No amount of logic or factual argument will get them so see otherwise, and anyone who so much as mentions misogyny is immediately accused of misandry. Misandry is the misogynists’ new favorite word this week. It is their new security blanket.

Brad DeLong is publishing The Daily Picketty, linking to people debunking Chris Giles’s “debunking” of Thomas Picketty. “I still do not understand what Chris Giles of the Financial Times thinks he is doing here…” Brad DeLong says. But Paul Krugman says it’s just standard inequality denial. Truly, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. Eh, Chris Giles?

On a different note — I’m so pleased My Book got its first customer review! Was that you, Swami? I hope that if anyone else has managed to slog through the thing and can say something nice about it, please put this on Amazon. If you didn’t like it, though, please keep it to yourself. 🙂

Stuff to Read

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I’m in my usual end-of-the-month crunch mode, so here are some links to tide you over:

First, by Charles Pierce, “The Passion of Big Chicken: The Pensioning.” The latest sleaze on Chris Christie.

Then, see Digby, “Scott Walker is falling apart: The little corruption problem he just can’t shake.” Juicy.

I’d like to write commentary on Roger Cohen’s “Captalism Eatng Its Children” but there’s no time, so I’ll link to it and maybe get back to it later.

Screen Capture Art

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Found on Salon this morning. I added the caption.

Update: You’ve probably heard about the hashtag #YesAllWomen set up for women “to share their stories of everyday sexism and misogyny – and to tell the world that enough is enough.” Even those of us who have never experienced physical assault have experienced sexual intimidation, belittling and humiliation, aimed at us only because of our gender. And most of the time we put up with it, because what else can we do? Confronting some sexist bozo could turn an unpleasant situation into something genuinely dangerous.

So how has the poitical Right responded to #YesAllWomen? Mostly with more belittling. Charles Cooke at NRO, for example, dismisses the social media phenomenon as “groupthink.” We women can’t possibly know our own experiences, apparently, and simply imagine misogyny because we’ve read about it. Assimilated tool that she is, Mollie Hemingway ridiculed the hashtag as “asinine.” One of Hemingway’s points is that “It’s A Mockery Of The Real Problems Women Face Throughout The World.”

As the #YesAllWomen craze spread, a woman was stoned by her family in Pakistan for marrying someone of her choice as opposed to someone of their arrangement. While the #YesAllWomen crowds talked about the unbearable horror of being whistled at on the street, annoyingly being told to smile, and being given gendered McDonald’s toys, more than 200 Nigerian girls remained in slavery to Islamist extremist rebels. While we turn the murder of six into a narcissistic contest of victimhood, a Sudanese Christian woman married to an American Christian man gave birth to a daughter in prison.

As I said above, it’s a difference in degree, not in kind. Apparently we’re not supposed to mind violations of our human dignity because other women have real problems.

And conservatives wonder why there’s a gender gap.

Roots of the Religious Right

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Here’s an article about religion in America, which gives me another opportunity to plug My Book.

The Real Origins of the Religious Right by Randall Balmer argues that it wasn’t abortion that turned evangelicalism into a political movement, but desegregation.

But the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In fact, it wasn’t until 1979–a full six years after Roe–that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. …

…Today, evangelicals make up the backbone of the pro-life movement, but it hasn’t always been so. Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.

Jerry Falwell got his start as a national figure by leading the resistance to school desegregation, and it was Weyrich who finally persuaded him to give it up as a lost cause and instead resist abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment, and that was in the late 1970s, a few years after Roe had been decided.

Same thing with birth control, as some of you might remember. I was living in the freaking Bible Belt when the pill became available, and I don’t recall any screams of outrage. Birth control was a “Catholic” issue, so the born-again crowd didn’t care. Now it seems conservative Christians generally have an issue with birth control.

The biblical basis for opposition to abortion and birth control is pathetically flimsy; note that 93 percent of American Jews support legalized abortion. To listen to conservative Christians these days you’d think Jesus’ entire mission was to stop gay marriage and abortion, even though he never addressed either issue and actually did talk about a lot of other, entirely unrelated, things.

One of the points I make in the book is that the more a religious faction gravitates toward extremist fundamentalism or terrorism, the less likely its adherents are to read their own scriptures or follow religious doctrines in any holistic way. Instead, they make a fetish out of some teachings, usually those having to do with sexual and other kinds of purity and veneration of symbols and icons, and mostly ignore the rest of it. This pattern is not limited to Christianity.

I also argue that religion is easily corrupted when it becomes an identity. It then is easily fused into racial, national, or political identity, which leads to beliefs of national exceptionalism (not limited to the U.S.) or political messianism, neither of which ever lead to anything good.

In the case of the Religious Right in the U.S., though, it actually goes back a lot further than Brown v. Board of Ed. Religious reactionism tends to attach itself to political reactionism, so whenever right-wing politics is pushing against progress and modernity, right-wing religion tends to be right beside it, to one extent or another, and this has been true throughout U.S. history. And the same thing happens in other nations as well.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries political and religious progressivism also made alliances, but for some time political progressivism has kept religious progressivism at arm’s length, and that’s a shame. One of the reasons I wrote the book is to argue that things don’t have to be that way.

The Heart of Darkness

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It shouldn’t surprise you that the “manosphere” is blaming the Isla Vista shootings on feminism and western anti-male culture generally. Here is an actual blog post from just two days ago:

Rodger should have checked his male privilege at the door and atoned for the sins of thousands of years of “male patriarchy.” He was likely exposed to infantile “trigger warnings” during the course of his education. He received direct propaganda that insinuates all men are potential rapists. American universities are becoming firmly anti-male with their extreme left ideology and policies. Just recently, the Justice Department has ushered in directives that attempt to restrict the definition of consensual sex, making any attempt by Rodger to fornicate with a female at a college party a potential rape encounter that would have gotten him kicked out of school without a trial. Pro-female policies now dominate most American universities. Rodger would definitely not have received a sympathetic ear to his plight. . . .

. . . Seven people are dead because society has decided that shy and awkward men like Elliot Rodger do not deserve a girlfriend and that there is absolutely no way to improve his loneliness and loserdom through learning game or any other social behavior. At the same time men like him are ostracized, there is no legal means for him to solicit prostitution (in California) to release his biological and very pressing urge for fornication. Current cultural dogma wants to sweep the millions of lonely men like Rodger under the rug while instead focusing on gay marriage, “street harassment,” lack of empowered girls in video games, “rape culture,” and the horrors of letting young girls wear pink and play with dolls.

The new “let them eat cake” is “let these socially awkward privileged losers have xbox and pornhub.” Yet we still feign outrage and surprise when every so often one of them picks up a gun and starts shooting. The same people who attack game refuse to give men like Rodger a way to achieve sexual happiness, and for that they are indirectly responsible for these deaths, which could have been avoided if Rodger was steered into game and not shamed for it.

More people will die unless you give men sexual options

Until you give men like Rodger a way to have sex, either by encouraging them to learn game, seek out a Thai wife, or engage in legalized prostitution—three things that the American media and cultural elite venomously attack, it’s inevitable for another massacre to occur.

The author of the post also expressed outrage that anyone would find his site offensive or the “manosphere” misogynistic.

The thing is, this guy is no lone outlier. He represents multitudes of men. There are vast swarms of these guys online. Since I don’t tend to blog about feminist issues except for reproductive rights, which doesn’t seem to interest the “men’s rights” crew (except for their belief that they should have a “choice” to not pay child support if they don’t want to), they don’t often show up here. But I’ve bumped into them in countless discussion threads on other sites. There are certain topics that will draw them like ants to a picnic, and when that happens they will completely dominate the thread and make rational discussion impossible. They are quite certain the world (which, apparently, is run by women) is discriminating against them, and they are seething with hostility about it.

Beside the “men’s choice” argument, they are particularly obsessed with the belief that civil courts and the justice system discriminate against men, as well as the educational establishment and the health care system (breast cancer research gets more money than prostate cancer research). There’s also a subset of them who are convinced their lives and manhood were ruined because they were circumcised as infants, without their consent, and routine male circumcision is just as bad — maybe worse — than female genital mutilation. But only women get sympathy for their “circumcisions” because women are privileged. Check out the discussion thread on this Salon article for examples. (Don’t assume you understand their arguments until you read them. There probably is a rational argument that routine circumcision is unnecessary, but that’s not the argument the MRAs are making.)

What usually happens on these threads is that maybe one or two emotionally healthy men will comment to gently suggest that the haters are off base, and then they disappear, and the only male voices on the thread will be MRAs venting their pathological hatred of women. I’ve seen this happen countless times. And what do you want to bet there is considerable overlap between the MRAs and gun rights crowd?

Last January Jill Filipovic and Amanda Hess wrote widely read articles on women being threatened and harassed online. These articles drew much sympathy but not much action or follow up.

For more on the MRA phenomenon do check out this anti-MRA website (run by a man, bless him) and its glossary, which is as good a primer on the MRA subculture as I’ve seen anywhere.

The anti-MRA blogger linked to a paper on “aggrieved entitlement” as a factor in violence, mass shootings in particular. This is close to a point I wrote about quite a bit in My Book, which says a combination of holy cause/fanatical grievance is a common feature of violent mass movements, whether religious or political or something else. In some cases, the sense of entitlement stands in as the holy cause.

Although I doubt those who are deep into MRA/PUA culture are likely to change I do think it’s important that more emotionally healthy men get involved in standing up to the MRAs. I suspect the widespread disapproval of other men could prevent more younger men from getting sucked into MRA-ism. This is not a fight women can wage alone.

Let’s Call It a Hate Crime

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In just about any comment threat on the Isla Vista shooting you can find on the web, someone is arguing that the shooter was “mentally ill” or “psychotic,” which means that misogyny had nothing to do with the crime. I responded to this in the last post — there’s no indication he was psychotic, and it’s doubtful any court in America would have let Rodger off on an insanity defense.

A few more observations:

First, it has long seemed to me that most Americans know next to nothing about psychiatric disorders, and basic information about mental health and psychiatric disorders ought to be taught in school, maybe beginning at middle school level. If nothing else, it might be useful to know that if your reclusive offspring insists on keeping his windows taped shut and covered with black plastic bags, he probably shouldn’t be allowed access to sharp objects, never mind guns.

Second, it seems to me that if Rodger’s videos showed him ranting about gays, Jews, racial minorities or the government, we’d be seeing a different reaction.

From what I have read, Rodger tried to break into a sorority house, and when he failed he shot three young women who were outside of the house — two killed, one wounded — then started shooting random people, killing one young man. He had already killed three young men who were in his apartment, two of whom were his roommates. So that was personal. The fact that he killed more men than women is supposed to be “proof” that it wasn’t about misogyny, in spite of the fact that he had explicitly said he wanted to break into that sorority house and kill women in it.

Let’s consider that after killing the three not-Jewish men in his apartment, he had attempted to break into a synagogue to kill Jews. He failed to get in but shot and killed two rabbis who were outside, then drove around and randomly shot another man, who was not Jewish. He left behind videos ranting that Jews were ruining his life and he wanted to break into a synagogue and kill them. Would anyone now be seriously arguing that antisemitism was not an issue?

And as far as crazy is concerned, there are entire websites of comments from men not substantially different from what Rodger said in his videos. For that matter, look at politicians. A Florida state lawmaker was ranting last week that the Common Core curriculum would turn students gay. Has anyone checked to see if that guy owns guns?

See also Echidne of the Snakes.

Under the Crazy Rug

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We’re now well into the “whose fault is it, anyway” phase of our standard post-shooting process, including our usual do-si-do over gun control versus gun rights. You know how that one goes.

A wrinkle in the Isla Vista shootings is that the alleged perp, Elliot Rodger, appears to have been deeply into the online “Men’s Rights” culture, which I think of as the He-Man Women Hater’s Club. Women are “targets” or “game” to this crew, although it would be wrong to say that they speak of women the same way a duck hunter speaks of mallards. Duck hunters are not seething with resentment of mallards. Duck hunters do not imagine that mallards are ruining their lives or plotting against them out of sheer inbred evil.

So on the one hand there are articles by Katie McDonough blaming “toxic male entitlement” and one by Amanda Hess calling out online “pick up” culture.

The counter-argument is expressed in a comment to McDonough’s article:

So if society were more respectful of women this would not have happened?

Misogyny played no role in this, mental illness did. Instead of addressing that issue, that is so clear you can see it from space. You turn it into a soap box for your favourite agenda.

Basically you are saying, misogyny turned this perfectly normal kid into a killer.

Wrong, mental illness did.

The problem with the “mental illness” theory is that there’s no indication the shooter was psychotic. Maladjusted, yes. A walking catalog of personality disorders, no doubt. Badly socialized, certainly. But he was not “insane.” He didn’t believe he was being controlled by Alpha Waves from Mars. He was capable of knowing right from wrong. Had he lived, he would have been fit to stand trial.

So, to all those who would sweep any motivation for the shootings under the crazy rug — I don’t think so.

The “Men’s Rights” culture really is a toxic soup of misogyny, and as with many online cultures there’s a tendency for participants to push each other into becoming more and more extreme. If Rodger was “mentally ill” so are a lot of the other jerks who write stuff like this:

I’m trying to think of ways our enemies will come after us because of this, but if anything, we’re the solution to this sort of murder rampage. This is the society that progressives wanted, where women are fully able to choose the top 10% of alpha males while shaming masculinity, leaving beta males with modest resources in the dust. Of course they will simply push a ban on guns, but this wholly neglects the cause. Seven people died because this guy couldn’t get laid, at the same time the Federal government is pursuing kangaroo courts to kick men out of college for “rape” that doesn’t need to be proved in a court of law. How can they not see this connection?

Society gave beta males a bargain—they work hard with the expectation of a wife and family. That bargain no longer exists so we can’t be surprised when one loses his mind and starts shooting. At the very least, prostitution should be legalized as a release valve. If the killer had access to some high quality hookers for $150 a pop, it would have given him some meaning.

This is an in-group culture that encourages the sexual objectification of women while also nurturing a fanatical grievance against them. In my book I argue that the combination of “holy cause” and “fanatical grievance” is at the root of most mass violence in the world. I’m not sure about the holy cause part, but these guys have got the fanatical grievance in spades.

This is a culture that not only winks at misogyny; it’s also one that makes oppressing women seem heroic. A guy who can somehow demean women is scoring one for the team. Of course, other men, the ones who get along with women, are resented as well.

If you combine that toxic culture with someone with a personality or socialization disorder, anything is possible. And I suspect most of these guys have personality or socialization disorders, or they wouldn’t be drawn to the culture. And their online interaction sets up a feedback loop that makes them all worse. I don’t think most of them will become mass murderers, but that’s only because most of them aren’t suicidal. If they weren’t concerned about repercussions they would be very dangerous, indeed.

See also Steve M.

Update: See also Strangely Blogged.

Another White Male With Guns Kills a Bunch of People

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Last night, in Isla Vista, California, seven dead including the white male shooter, others critically injured. You know the drill. Right is already blaming Hollywood and liberals. Steve M shudders at the thought Ross Douhat will blame sexual permissiveness.

It’s way early to discuss why the shooter, a 22-year-old from an affluent family, did this. Police haven’t released any information about the victims. However, the alleged shooter had made some videos said to be of him ranting about women rejecting him. A Daily Kos diarist determined that the shooter was subscribed to a bunch of Men’s Rights and “pick up artist” You Tube channels. This may prove to not mean anything, of course.